What Most Teams Miss About AI and Customer Feedback!

Duncan Riley (00:01)

Hello and welcome back to Building Momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful technology business. Today, I'm excited to welcome our next guest, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Twine. Twine is transforming how product and go-to market teams collaborate by using AI to automatically extract valuable insights from customer conversations. Their platform acts as a bridge between sales,

customer success and product teams, helping companies capture up to 15 times more customer feedback without any manual effort. Organizations like Tapcart, Cascade Strategy and Trace are using Twine to make faster, more customer-centric decisions that drive growth. Please join me in welcoming Max Bausher, who's here to share his journey and a bit more about Twine and how he's helping teams turn customer conversations into company-wide action.

Max, welcome to the show.

Max Bausher @ Twine (01:00)

Thanks for having me Duncan, this is awesome. Looking forward to it.

Duncan Riley (01:03)

No problem.

So what is Twine and what's the big problem that you're trying to solve out in the world?

Max Bausher @ Twine (01:11)

Yeah, absolutely. So Twine is an AI driven company. It's essentially, think of it like hiring someone into your business to join every customer facing call, share that valuable insight that we're hearing on those calls every day more effectively around the business. We're trying to solve that cross-functional gap where oftentimes go to market and product, product marketing teams don't always have a meaningful way of exchanging.

customer intelligence we're hearing. So Twine's really trying to solve that problem using AI.

Duncan Riley (01:43)

It's a very interesting product and you're very kind to show me a demo the other week. How is it you came to develop Twine and what's the story behind it?

Max Bausher @ Twine (01:54)

Yeah. I think a lot of founders will probably have this story, but it came from about 15 years of working in go-to-market companies, SaaS, B2B SaaS companies and go-to-market roles. kind of in my time was a sales rep, sales engineer, pre-sales technical sales engineer, customer success engineering, led teams in all those spaces. so

Over that time, I started to see this problem where as my companies grew through their success, teams become more distributed and the systems we have to document what we're hearing in the field become more siloed. And the people that need it often the most, people making roadmap decisions, product messaging decisions, helping us defend against and outmaneuver competition popping up, they weren't hearing nearly enough of what we were. so.

with, with AI coming into play and the way we're approaching it, it's really about leveraging that in a multiplayer mode to make it just dead simple for people to hear at mass what customers are asking for every day. Yeah.

Duncan Riley (02:56)

Yeah, it's

a, you know, I've got a product background myself and you know, when I was sort of delving a little bit deeper into Twine and sort of uncovering how a tool could help capture, you know, voices of the customer at mass got me really excited. What would you say was your sort of aha moment, you know, that goes, you know, there's a tool that can do this.

Max Bausher @ Twine (03:22)

Yeah, well, think the big aha moment was that there wasn't one. So traditionally that workflow was get off a call with a customer, have some shorthand notes. Hopefully it's recorded somewhere like a gong or maybe a meeting recording. And then as the account manager team, say sales engineer, I'd have to go find time later in the day to clip that call or scribble those notes into a CRM field, file a ticket in JIRA. And let's be honest, like

No one's doing that stuff unless the deal is really critical and we can't lose it. And that's only a very small subset of our customers. And there was plenty of positive things the customers were saying that there was no way I would find time to document. I would just store it in my brain and it would become tribal knowledge. so what AI allowed us to do is take that manual workflow off my plate. And I guess that was the unlock for me, realizing that while most AI tools today are focusing on replacing

a certain role or making it more efficient or maybe even a function, we're looking cross-functionally and seeing ways that horizontally we can make really critical paths between different functions more effective and efficient.

Duncan Riley (04:30)

So would you say you're trying to solve a problem for product teams to gather that information faster and more efficiently? Or would you say that the whole company and different teams are benefiting from Twine and its functionality?

Max Bausher @ Twine (04:44)

Yeah, it's what you're exposing is, is an interesting problem that Twine tackles and that it's a shared problem. And as a result, it can be quite, like a sort of a Swiss army knife. in the sense that depending on who you are in the business, you might want to do different things with this combination of customer call data and CRM data. which is how we sort of pair pair the things together. And so.

It really comes down when we talk to customers to understanding what their needs are. If you're a go-to-market leader, you might want to know about critical deal blockers in opportunities that are closing in the next quarter to keep across it with your team. If you're a product manager on a particular product area, you might want to know the same critical blockers, but just only around your product area mentions. Regional leaders might want feedback to compare their region against global.

customer base, there's a ton of different ways to use it. So it's really important that depending on who you are in the business, we understand sort of what your goals are and then help you build the appropriate reporting out of Twine.

Duncan Riley (05:45)

Fantastic. I guess as well as it's really sort of a great way to gather evidence on where to invest, you know, your money, you know, in the product. And it's that validation as well, because if you can, you know, as a business pull up, you know, certain amount of conversations that are shouting about a specific integration or a specific feature, then obviously as a business owner who's developing a product.

Max Bausher @ Twine (05:53)

100%. Yeah.

Duncan Riley (06:09)

you can then go, right, this is, if I spend money in this integration or on this feature, it's gonna potentially unlock X amount of revenue. And so I think from where I'm sitting, this is exactly where Twine can really stand out.

Max Bausher @ Twine (06:23)

Yeah, definitely. think like two things that typically impede that in a business I've found anyways, or customers talk to us about this a lot is, is recency bias and subjectivity bias. Those two biases in the sense that if a product team wants to know where to prioritize, they typically will go to a report. If the report doesn't give them enough, they will go to a product or a go to market leader.

And they will have the recency bias issue of based on who they talked to in their team recently in short-term memory, what have they heard from the field? But that's not always necessarily representative. And oftentimes you're talking to maybe a regional leader or that has, you know, one view of what's priority in their realm. And then the other piece of it is subjectivity bias. Like what product teams often say they need is like the objective voice of customer.

They just want to hear it in the customer's words. They don't want to hear it manipulated into a ticket based on what their own internal go-to-market teams want. It's almost counterintuitive, but it's better if AI extracts it than if your AE or your CSM does it because the team can kind of see that through a lens that's not motivated by revenue attainment.

Duncan Riley (07:32)

Yeah.

Exactly. I suppose it's good old Chinese whispers as well. It's, you what one says about a particular feature might not mean, you know, interpret what a customer says. And at least you've got it exactly from the customer through a transcript, which is, which is excellent. And I was just thinking about as well, know, if you've got sort of cross regional or, you know, across international, across teams on different time zones, you know, how can...

Twine sort of help with that, you know, because you've got, have a sales team in the UK or US and then over here in Australia, you might have the product team. So how can Twine sort of help teams like that?

Max Bausher @ Twine (08:17)

Yeah. Trace is a good example of that. know you mentioned them in the intro. Like one of the things we found with them is what sort of surprised me about them actually originally was there's smaller company, they're a startup. So you wouldn't expect them to have this like problem necessarily. But the way they described it to us was that they have teams, despite being small, they have teams sitting in the UK, here in Australia and a couple of other countries as well. And both culturally.

in certain countries and just generally by tenure, certain folks that are having customer calls in those regions don't always speak up about what they were hearing on calls, no matter how much product encouraged them to capture it. And product team sits in Sydney. So to your point, asynchronously, getting this feedback, would kind of come overnight and you'd lose these times. With Twine, what we were able to do there was basically

create a feed because we integrate with Slack, it would just show up in a report to the product team overnight. Whatever had happened was automatically kind of landing in their lap. And there was already common conversations going on in Slack threads off the back of the videos that we were clipping. And people that normally wouldn't speak up in a meeting in front of other counterparts in other regions were speaking up in Slack because it felt safer.

Duncan Riley (09:33)

Yep.

Max Bausher @ Twine (09:34)

And so it did start to inspire, I guess, a more collaborative culture based on those clips that were just now coming through without necessarily a squeaky wheel getting the attention, which was kind of cool to see. Yeah.

Duncan Riley (09:45)

Fantastic,

yeah, absolutely. And we just touched on integrations there. know Twine has a variety of integrations. How important is connecting all the systems together for Twine?

Max Bausher @ Twine (09:57)

Yeah.

It's been like a big problem area for us, but also a big unlock at the same time. Like we're blessed with a team that can move quite quickly on this. And then we've also outsourced some of the connection points where we could to like partners, like merge.dev is a great partner of ours for connecting to CRMs. But yeah, the essential way of how Twine works is we connect to calls.

Oftentimes, sales and CS teams already use a call recorder, like Gong or Firefly's AirCall. And if they're using something like that, we can API into that and pull in calls from their workspace. So nothing changes about the way they interact with their customers today or how they record those calls. We're simply doing the analysis off the back. And then everything we find in the calls we want to marry to the CRM, because there's such a rich amount of data to then filter different

sort of customer profiles from what's in the CRM. And so we pull in through an integration into CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce. We can ingest fields from there and marry that up with the call data automatically.

Duncan Riley (11:01)

Yeah, brilliant. Fantastic.

Max Bausher @ Twine (11:02)

Yeah.

And I guess the last one would be Slack. We really want to be able to create reports that go to you rather than you having to sign in to Twine to find them. Not everyone needs to start their day in Twine, but they can start it in Slack and come into Twine to investigate further.

Duncan Riley (11:18)

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, can look at it on the way to work on their commute to the office. Yeah. Excellent. So with all that in mind, you've obviously been on a of a journey so far. What would you say has been the biggest challenge that you've encountered and sort of how have you overcome that?

Max Bausher @ Twine (11:23)

That's it. Yeah.

Yeah, I've touched on one there with integrations. There is an explosion of call recording tools, new CRMs, AI-driven functionality across them. thankfully, there are partners like Merge where we can instantly connect through a single unified API service to all the CRMs in a consistent way. And that's allowed us to immediately reach our customers where they work.

The other piece of it is just the nature of connecting to these systems requires a certain level of review in larger companies. So one thing that you might find is kind of atypical for some startups is that we actually went for security and compliance right out the gate. So we are like SOC 2 type 2 and GDPR compliant despite being a year into operation.

Basically, it was a must have for the kind of customers that we're talking to like B2B SaaS companies. Startups maybe is sometimes less of a problem, but as soon as you get into commercial to small enterprise sized businesses, it's a hard requirement. So that was something we had to tackle a lot earlier than we potentially had seen from other startups.

Duncan Riley (12:50)

That's very smart because I know how long that can take. To get approved on that is a very lengthy process and that can definitely hinder you from not necessarily launching but launching into the market where your customers are. So I can see how that could have been a big issue. yeah, kudos for getting that done.

Max Bausher @ Twine (13:08)

Yeah, thanks. It was, it wasn't easy, but it was important for if we were going to solve this well, it was kind of like I said, it was just one of those things you had to knuckle down and do.

Duncan Riley (13:11)

Yeah.

Yeah, brilliant, good. And I would say sort of lastly on this Max, Twine obviously is centered around AI. It'd be great to sort of tell the audience a little bit about how that works. Are you exploring the world of AI agents? I know it's a very topical subject at the moment and whether that's within the product or sort of to...

improve your backend processes. I know you're a fairly lean team, so how have you leveraged that?

Max Bausher @ Twine (13:46)

Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, aside from dog fooding our own or drinking our own champagne or whatever, recording our own calls with Twine, we definitely like to, one interesting one I figured you guys might like is taking customer recordings that we're setting up to capture testimonials. So capture kind of value of Twine. So after we've found a couple of real wins,

between the product and go-to-market teams that are our clients. We'll sit down and talk through those use cases with them, similar to how we're doing now. But we'll pump that through like Claude. And we've coached it with different examples and things to cut the transcripts from those knowing in a project about all of our collateral, our blog posts, our other case studies, our...

or sort of manifesto for the company and all sorts of different things, it will curate a first draft of a case study for us. And then we can obviously edit that, but it takes a huge amount of the heavy lifting out of structuring it and writing it and picking out quotes from the call. And then what we do is we'll send that across to the customer for review and they appreciate it as well. And it's a really awesome turnaround.

Right now with so many mediums, the ones that you own in terms of content is really important for your brand. I think case studies and testimonials are a great way to do that. But we're only a team of four. So doing that stuff efficiently is really important. It's been a unlock in terms of how we just, a quick and easy way to use AI to level up what a team of four can do around building the brand in market.

and that's been really fun. We're excited to do more and more of that this year.

Duncan Riley (15:26)

Yeah, definitely. It's exciting. Exciting space to be in. Definitely within the tech space and utilizing AI. It's very exciting. The possibilities seem limitless at this stage. Yeah.

Max Bausher @ Twine (15:38)

Yeah, definitely. It's

fast moving. There's a lot of, a lot of players in the market, but, yeah, it's, it's been a lot of fun to see. Like, you know, we're a team of four, it's been one year and we've managed to become compliant, build a functioning product, land customers. It's been a wild ride, but it is one of those things where I don't think we couldn't, we could

do that without AI in our business from the ground up. The way our CTO uses co-pilots, the way we use it to write content and riff on messaging and, you know, it's almost like a fifth employee on all of our desktops.

Duncan Riley (16:16)

Yeah, yeah,

exactly. It's definitely something that, know, if the audience watching, you know, they should definitely be looking at that for their business as well and thinking about how they can implement sort of agents and utilize the AI beyond ChatGPT to act as that fifth person or additional employee.

Max Bausher @ Twine (16:33)

Yeah, it's

a great efficiency gain for an individual level. then, like I said, we're focusing more on the multiplayer mode of AI.

Duncan Riley (16:42)

Yeah,

yeah, it's very smart, very smart. So again, with all this in mind, Max, what's next for Twine? So what's on the horizon and what's the vision? Obviously located here in Australia. What does that look like for you?

Max Bausher @ Twine (16:57)

Yeah, absolutely. think, you from a business standpoint, we're solving a global problem. So our focus is global. We're talking to customers in every major region at the moment. Another big piece of that for us is moving up market now that we have the compliance secured and it's, we're committed to that sort of approach. We really want to see, you know,

all varieties of businesses, but business to business software companies of larger sizes playing with this as well. I think it's great for anybody that's globally or sort of distributed in function or region, even if you're a smaller company, but the problem gets increasingly difficult to solve the bigger you get. And so we're looking, yeah, like I said, global and up market a bit more with helping customers.

Outside of that, we are also, from a roadmap perspective, considering a variety of different things. Right now, we're focusing on customer calls, so that kind of unstructured data. Increasing our integrations into product-related team tools, tooling, like roadmap tooling, is one avenue we're looking at as well. So there's a lot of different ways that we could go. But yeah, I think...

just building a groundswell with customers. This year is our primary focus. That's probably not surprising to hear, but yeah.

Duncan Riley (18:17)

No,

of course, and getting those use cases built up and solving real, sort of, tangible problems for product teams and customers. But that's it, Max. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Thank you so much for giving us your time and letting us into the world of Twine. And we wish you all the very best and success throughout your venture.

Max Bausher @ Twine (18:35)

Yeah, thank you so much for giving us an opportunity to share what we're doing and where we're going. Obviously, love to chat with anyone about AI practice as well, not just about Twine, but in general. It's a really cool thing you're doing, spreading that word. And yeah, we really appreciate the time. Thanks for the opportunity.

Duncan Riley (18:54)

Brilliant. Thank you, Max. Speak soon.

Max Bausher @ Twine (18:56)

All right, thanks Duncan.

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